Thursday, September 10, 2015

Ramblings Post #297There are many unofficial holidays in America. Days when things just don't happen. The day after Thanksgiving is one. The Friday before Memorial Day and Labor Day. These are days when we're either in recovery from what we did, or preparing to go do something we'll need to recover from. But most of our unofficial holidays involve sport. Opening Day of Baseball Season. The day the new Madden comes out. The Monday after the Superbowl. It is a great time to be alive.

There is nothing quite like football season. When I was younger, the smell of the pads, the feel of the grass when you stretched, that first crunching hit of the day. It seemed like old times. I didn't play for long, had knee surgery my senior year of high school (that along with some local shenanigans) so I moved on. But it was a good time to be alive and playing football.

As they say, the game has changed. I used to dream of playing, now I dream of owning a team.

But all that aside, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick should be kicked out of football and have no hope of reaching the Hall of Fame. For the judge who handled the case to believe that because the rules and penalties for cheating weren't clearly spelled out there should be no punishment (that's really what the ruling says, not that Brady is innocent) is a farce. I'm with the consensus that the judge probably has Brady on his fantasy team. My understanding is that this punishment is really like an Oscar for what is universally perceived as a merely good performance, i.e, you're not really getting this because you were the best, you're getting this because of something you did in the past. Because if you read the Spygate overview, and i did, I'm quite frankly surprised that two or three folks didn't have to involuntarily retire. Forty games is a lot of games.

And to top off this inauspicious start to the season, the first game is the Steelers vs the Patriots. I'm not sure who is worse, the Steeler fans or the Pats fans. But since the Pats fans seem to be okay with blatant cheating, I'm hoping the Steelers pull it out. Wait is wrong to root for a tie?

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Kim Davis is not being persecuted for her beliefs. She's being persecuted because she doesn't understand what she actually does.

First, you have to realize that their are two kinds of marriage in America. There is religious marriage, and then there is legal marriage. We all know religious marriage - it involves months of planning, ugly bridesmaid dresses, flowers, arguments over colors and seating arrangements, culminating with a white clad woman walking slowly down an aisle because it's "HER" day. And then there is legal marriage. That's the one with all the tax benefits and legal rights. And I think it's because the government has co-opted that term, marriage, that people get all flustered.

It has been my experience that words get people all mad. If you changed the term, but kept all the same circumstances I don't' think we'd have any argument here. Everybody gets civil unions from the government, hooray! But then someone would claim they'd "won" which is whole other argument, so forget it. Where was I? Co-opted, right.

The government has co-opted the term Marriage for it's own purposes. But under the law, just like two heterosexual people who agree to a certain social condition receive beneficial government treatment it makes sense that it is discriminatory to tell two people who are homosexual that they cannot receive beneficial government treatment if they are willing to assume the same social condition. To Huckabee's credit, the court didn't write new law. But then if you look at it, they didn't have to. They only applied what we already have.

Now Ms. Davis seems to believe that granting a marriage license means the bearer can walk into any church and demand a ceremony. Well, a lot of her supporters do as well, why I don't know, but this isn't the case. (By the way, most people get both a religious AND a legal marriage, which may contribute to the confusion, but I digress.) Her argument that she cannot in good conscience grant the license because it offends her belief is misguided, unless her belief is that two homosexual people should not receive treatment from the government equal to that of two heterosexual people in a similar condition. Her act does not grant a marriage in the eyes of God, that position belongs to the church. Her act grants a marriage in the eyes of the government, a wholly less than spiritual organization. There should be no issue here, but maybe she's confused God and the government, or somehow fused the two together in her mind, which is a whole other discussion.

And by the way, the analogy to the Muslim cashier at Target not handling pork, which my very Christian friend on Facebook (and Kim Davis supporter) bandied about as evidence that this is Christian persecution, is an extremely weak one. First, as much as hate to admit this public....access to bacon is not really a Right. And at Target, you can always go to another cashier. But in her county Ms. Davis was the only place to get a marriage license, something that is a Right. And it the issue of pork handling became a real issue for a capitalist venture like Target, those affected workers could always be re-assigned to other positions (provided of course there was no loss of pay.)